98 Guy wrote
MEB wrote

It may be time [or rather past time] to think about
using the hard drive manufacturer tools rather than
MS fdisk and format for ANY drive manipulation.

As I've posted in the past, I favor the use of manufacturer-provided
tools because they usually allow a drive to be FAT-32 formatted
with non-standard cluster sizes.

Which have their own downsides. And thats a stupid way to
describe them, its better to describe them as non Microsoft tools.

But for most people it's not necessary - FDISK and Format will suffice.

The manufacturers newest tools all now have NTFS abilities built-in
[some more than others - of particular interest to dual booters],

I think there's a good case to be made to install Win-2k or
XP on a drive formatted as FAT-32 as opposed to NTFS.

You're wrong.

Even if the system is not dual-boot. The advantages of
NTFS are largely lost on most single-user or SOHO users.

Wrong when they cant even write the large files that are now
so common with the systems used as PVRs and media players.

It is easier (and cheaper) to diagnose, fix, detect and
remove malware on a FAT-32 drive than it is for NTFS.

And proper backups are a MUCH better way to handle that stuff.

The reliability and performance of FAT-32 is highly under-rated.
And if the system is dual-boot, then both OS's have access to
all files on all volumes.

Only a fool bothers to dual boot 98 and XP.

Want to use larger drives?
Then consider: a newer mother board [or a used board that supports
larger drives];

For those that may not know, any motherboard that has a Pentium-4 or
Celeron CPU (technically, socket 478 or newer) will have the necessary
support for large hard drives, and in some (many?) cases a BIOS update
is available for motherboards with Pentium 3 CPU's.